Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products. Customers are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with the customer's query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available.
The terms “call center” and “contact center” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, SMS, chat, web access, video access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the terms “call” and “contact” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but include contacts made by email, fax, voice over IP and any other suitable medium.
Typically a call screening or filtering process is used to find out what type of treatment is required for an incoming contact. As mentioned above this often involves use of an interactive voice response system to determine which skill set is most appropriate for the incoming contact and/or to allocate a priority level to the incoming contact. This screening or filtering process is lengthy, especially for contact centres having many skill sets, operating for many different media types of contact and offering different priority levels or levels of service to customers. In such situations there is a need to allow users of the contact centre to reach a particular agent without undergoing the screening or filtering process. For example, if a customer needs to communicate with a particular agent repeatedly about the same issue.
Previously this problem has been addressed in three main ways all of which have shortcomings as now described. A first method has involved using identifiers to keep track of all incoming contacts relating to a particular issue. For example, consider a customer who contacts a contact centre to request technical information about a product before deciding whether to purchase that product. The customer obtains the information and needs to return to the contact centre later after having checked that the product will meet his or her requirements. During the initial interaction with the contact centre a unique identifier is allocated to the case and details about that identifier, the customer, the agent handling the case and the initial interaction are stored in a database accessible by the contact centre. When the customer returns to the contact centre, he or she is prompted to give the identifier during the screening or filtering process. The contact centre accesses details about the case from the database using the unique identifier and directs the customer to the same agent who previously dealt with the matter. However, this method is complex and involves the use of a database accessible to the contact centre. In addition, the customer must still undergo the screening or filtering process at least in part and needs to remember the unique identifier provided.
A second method has involved trying to identify the customer by the address from which the contact originates. For example, this address may be the telephone number of the terminal used by the customer or the internet address of that terminal. If the contact centre is able to obtain this information it is able to determine whether an incoming contact is from a customer who has recently contacted the centre. If so, details of that previous interaction can be accessed from a database and used to decide how to treat the incoming contact. However, there are many situations in which information about the address from which the customer contact originates is not available. For example, if the customer is calling from within a private network that only exposes a generic address. Also, if the customer contacts the centre from different addresses at different times, this method will not work. Another drawback is that, using this method, the contact centre is unable to determine whether the incoming contact is related to the same issue as previously raised by the customer, or whether it relates to a new matter.
A third method has involved individual agents at the call centre giving customers direct contact details for particular agent stations in the contact centre. This method has been employed, often in time critical situations, in which customers need to contact a particular agent quickly and directly without undergoing the screening or filtering process to access the contact centre. However, this method exposes details of the internal agent stations to customers or other users of the contact centre. This is disadvantageous from a security point of view and also because the customers or end users concerned are then able to continue bypassing the normal access system to the contact centre. This is problematic, because administrative control of the contact centre is compromised. For example, a particular strategy for workload allocation between agents at the contact centre may be implemented by the screening and filtering process. If customers are able to bypass that process then the workload allocation breaks down.